Ryan O’Connell says gay men are drugging themselves in order to have the perfect body
The actor and creator of the Netflix series 'Special calls for disabled bodies to be 'normalised'
By Steve Brown
Words: Steve Brown
Ryan O’Connell has the perfect response to muscle men who starve themselves to look good.
O’Connell shot to fame with the new eight-episode Netflix Special – which is based around his part-memoir, part-manifesto ‘I’m Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves’ – is loosely based on his own upbringing and experiences as a gay man living with cerebral palsy.
And now while speaking to IndieWire, O’Connell hits back at ‘Insta-gays’ who would rather drug themselves with GHB instead of getting drunk ‘because they don’t want to waste the calories’.
He said: “What really gets my goat is a lot of these guys have latched onto the body-positive movement, and they’re like, ‘Loving your curves is important! That five-to-ten extra pounds on your body is full of fun memories. It’s you sleeping in and waiting to give yourself permission to just be’.
“But it’s all posted by people who have two-percent body fat. This is not the look.
“I don’t need somebody with an eight-pack to tell me how to love my body. That’s triggering. They’re all starving. That’s called no joy.
“A six-pack of abs is like six individual teardrops placed neatly on your stomach. They’re not having fun.
“Those are the kind of guys that take GHB instead of getting drunk because they don’t want to waste the calories.
“The fact that gay men everywhere are literally drugging themselves with something that’s commonly known as the date-rape drug because they don’t want to gain one pound is truly new levels of darkness.
“I don’t love being naked. Shocker. But it’s important for bodies like mine to be normalized.
“And by ‘bodies like mine,’ I mean a disabled body. Bodies that don’t have abs. Normal, average, run-of-the-mill gay bodies.”